Star Siren

She is a departure from my more light-hearted creations. I was looking at kachinas and then Star came along. She doesn't evoke a kachina to me, but has her own personality and form. I called her Wood Spirit for a time, until she had completely revealed herself, beginning with the woody base of a large mullein plant, and then the addition of burr oak, woody grape tendrils and fuzzy fungus. The stars in her eyes and on some of her decorations are at the center of every burr oak twig or branch, large or small. The stars on her necklace are at the center of cottonwood twigs. I found this relationship, in the reverse, to be fascinating. Cottonwoods were sacred to the Lakotas. She is 10 inches tall.

Beginnings - The Great Mystery

Well now, this is a new venture into the world of blogs. Does anyone read these, or are they just ego trips? Will find out............

I am on a search for the authentic fabric of life. Once it was simple: I was raised a Christian in a small midwestern town and that was that. Ha! Always interested in Nature and all of her features and inhabitants, it began to seem unfair to me that only man was created in the image of God. Questions - so many questions.

Eventually I worked my way through various religions, but they always seemed to elevate human life as being the crowning achievement of creation. Hmmmmm. The most I could see is that humans have the greatest capacity for creativity, but then so often use it for destructive purposes perpetrated upon the natural world or others who had been objectified or vilified first.

I keep returning to aboriginal beliefs. To me these are the original beliefs of the human species before we became so full of ourselves that we began to worship our own image and gave ourselves dominion over the earth. I believe that humans are far more embedded into the Web of Life than we know and if our attitude doesn't change then there will be very hard lessons ahead. Unfortunately all of the inhabitants of Earth will suffer for our hubris.

So this blog will be about my journey, as an artist and an explorer of the web of life and what it means.